One of the problems with playing games on a touchscreen is the fact that in order to interact with the game you need to cover part of the screen. That’s why when the iCade became a real product it turned out to be a very popular peripheral. The only problem is it is quite expensive.

Paul Rickards, a self-professed tinkerer, has discovered you don’t actually need to purchase an iCade in order to use a separate controller for iPad games. You can in fact use your own game pads connected through an Arduino to the iPad via USB.

Rickards discovered he could use his own controllers by accident while getting a homebrew C64 keyboard to work with iMAME on the iPad over USB. When he pressed keys on the keyboard, iMAME said it was enabling iCade mode. That’s strange as iCade interfaces with the iPad via Bluetooth, but it looks as though the type of connection doesn’t actually matter.

With that discovery, Rickards set about making another Arduino board talk to the iPad via USB using the V-USB library–something he had done previously for the keyboard project. Only this time he set it up for a NES controller. The Arduino is housed in a case made of Lego, which the NES pad and the USB connector plug into. Both are powered over the USB port on the iPad.

The end result is iCade-compatible games controlled via the NES pad for significantly less investment than buying an iCade. There’s also nothing to stop you using other controllers as long as you can get them to interface with the Arduino.

Rickards has said he will post the code enabling others to create a similar setup, he just needs to clean it up a bit first.